Life on the Ice

Quick Overview

Roff Smith takes readers on a fascinating trek across the icy plains of the coldest and most remote edge of the world.

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Details

Paperback, 216 pages, February 2005.

Antarctica: the edge of the world, the last continent, the Ice. It's a place many people dream of visiting. Yet few know how to get there; and even fewer know how to survive if they do.

Roff Smith, author of Cold Beer and Crocodiles and an award-winning correspondent for Time magazine, has visited Antarctica three times. Life on the Ice is his collection of fascinating stories drawn from his various experiences in this cold corridor of the world. With vivid detail, Smith describes sailing through sea ice on a yacht, traveling with helicopter pilots, measuring the true height of Mount Erebus, and crawling through an eerie crashed plane long-buried under the ground. His stories are also filled with insightful depictions of the always interesting (and often eccentric) characters who have come to Antarctica to make a home within its freezing isolation. Smith also describes the humorous bureaucracy of the bases?where there is a form to fill in and a procedure for everything, from air and sea travel to the most ordinary bodily functions.

From the beauty of the blue-white landscape to the brutality of its subdegree temperatures, Smith paints a complete and compelling portrait of one of the most fascinating places in the world. While the allure of the Ice is surely that of freedom, Smith shows readers that the price one pays for that freedom is living a daily life that is indivisible from danger.